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Bridge to Stuyvesant High School, NYC (Photo credit: Tyler Merbler)

Back in 2003, over a year and a half after my mother suddenly died from a Christmas morning brain aneurysm, I dramatically changed my job description from cofounder of Monk Magazine/Monk Media to high school debate coach. The reasons behind that quantum shift are revealed in my forthcoming documentary, Crotty’s Kids. What’s important to know here is that I started my coaching odyssey at Stuyvesant High School, near Ground Zero in Manhattan's Battery Park City.

Stuyvesant is widely regarded as the best of the nine free New York City public high schools that select students based on a highly competitive Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT). As required by New York State's heroic Hecht-Calandra Act, the SHSAT is supposedly the only way that these schools can ascertain admission. The refreshing meritocratic idea is this: regardless of your race, nationality, or family background, if you score well on the SHSAT, you gain admittance. The top three of New York's nine specialized high schools are Stuyvesant (average cut-off score: 562), Bronx Science (average cut-off score: 509), and Brooklyn Tech (average cutoff score: 480).

Though my Stuyvesant debaters were clearly test smart, what struck me most about them was how decent, kind and emotionally intelligent they were. These were not bratty bright kids. These were bright kids with hearts of gold. I particularly remember one wise and compassionate young man, Eugene Marshalik, who was later murdered by a crazed gunman, while serving as one of NYU's volunteer auxiliary police officers.

It, thus, came as a great shock to learn in Tuesday’s New York Times of widespread cheating at my beloved Stuyvesant High School. The students interviewed by the Times offered a series of convoluted causes and rationales:

Bad classes and worse teachers;

The pressure to get top grades in order to secure admittance to top colleges;

A perverse moral relativism, where the ends – good schools, good jobs – justify the means.

The cheating methods at Stuyvesant, as chronicled by the Times, included the tried-and-true: copying answers onto scraps of paper; hiding formulas up one’s arm or on a water bottle; “tip-offs” about questions from students who took an exam earlier in the day; and even a tapping system (once for A, twice for B, and so on). Cheating at Stuyvesant also included modern tech gambits, such as sending answers via text, posting answers to Facebook, Googling facts on a smart phone, and snapping a photo of test questions for real-time replies. When Stuyvesant’s student newspaper, The Spectator, conducted a survey of 2045 students in March of 2012, 80% said they had cheated.

Because of the widespread cheating by the city’s putative "best and brightest," Stuyvesant principal, Jie Zhang, has banned iPads, laptops, and cell phones during the school day. Students also told the Times that they've seen increased staff use of Turnitin (“the global leader in plagiarism prevention”), though those interviewed suggested that the punishments for cheating remain light.

While Stuyvesant now requires all students to sign an honor pledge – they vow not to cheat, and to turn in others who do – the long-term enforcement is bound to be lax. This is partly because the signature Stuyvesant spirit of teamwork and cooperation applies to cheating as well. Moreover, notes the Times, teachers and administrators – in part because of the inordinate academic demands placed on their students -- are willing to look the other way. One can theoretically understand why. As the Stuyvesant adage goes, "you can choose any two of three items: grades, friends, or sleep."

Learning of this conundrum, this former debate coach has a few “solvencies” for my Stuyvesant peers. First, provide Stuyvesant students -- upon their very entrance onto the $150 million state-of-the-art campus – with a crash course in ethics. Not the kind of ethics that explains away bad behavior as a lockstep manifestation of peer pressure, environment, or other external factors, as I am sure any New York Times “ethicist” would be wont to do. Rather, ethics as a function of will.

The great American philosophical pragmatist William James understood ethics. Rather than seeking external excuses for bad behavior, James urged readers to develop countervailing habits of good behavior. It is through habitual practice, says James, animated by a free and active will, that we develop a strong moral character, regardless of circumstance. For what is character, noted J.S Mill, but a “completely fashioned will.”

James explains in The Laws of Habit, “It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word 'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. However, the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits, —practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit ... as I am now about to talk of it to you.”